Archives

Declare that raising the U.S. debt ceiling is off the table. Present to the public a specific plan as to how the U.S. should prioritize spending of available cash: payments first for the military and veterans, then for Social Security and Medicare (but not Medicaid), then for creditors (except for hostile governments such as China …

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, speaking on “Fox News Sunday” this week, cited these statistics, which are remarkable though not in the way that Geithner meant: And remember this country, this great nation with our great resources today, one in eight Americans are eligible for food stamps today. Forty percent of Americans born today are born …

As if having read my blog (Shared Sacrifice) from Tuesday and reprising his role as the villain, President Obama said this yesterday: Look, I want everybody in America to do well. I want everybody to have a chance to become a millionaire. I think the free market system is the greatest wealth generator we’ve ever …

President Obama and fellow Democrats use the phrase “shared sacrifice” so often that the phrase is now a standard term. I have not heard any Republican use the term favorably, but neither have I heard any Republican dispute the notion. The only argument I have heard some Republicans raise is that the Democrats are hypocrites, …

Today I celebrated Independence Day by reading the Declaration of Independence and some pages of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Anyone who wonders about the connection is invited to read the right-hand column of the home page of this blog. Second Renaissance Books once published a tear-off calendar, “Ayn Rand Quote of the Day • …

Ron on the Web

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” — Ayn Rand, in an afterword to Atlas Shrugged, 1957.

"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787.

"I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
"I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
"It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing."
— Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, 1943.

“[T]he difference between the historian and the poet is ... that the one tells of things that have been and the other of such things as might be. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, in that poetry tends rather to express the universal, history rather the particular fact.”
— Aristotle, The Poetics; translation by James Hutton, 1982.

“[I]f there is more tragic a fool than the businessman who doesn’t know that he’s an exponent of man’s highest creative spirit—it’s the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy.” — Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, 1957.

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" — Patrick Henry, 1775.

"To say 'I love you,' one must know first how to say the 'I.'"
— Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, 1943.

“… what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?
Still one thing more, fellow citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”
— Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801.

"Whatever people do in the market economy, is the execution of their own plans. In this sense every human action means planning. What those [in government] calling themselves planners advocate is not the substitution of planned action for letting things go. It is the substitution of the planner’s own plan for the plans of his fellow men." — Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos, 1947.

"I swear--by my life and my love of it--that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." — Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, 1957.